Caterpillar


Book Description

For this book, Frank Raczon dug up the dirt and constructed the only modern history of the world's heaviest machinery. So many things differentiate the Caterpillar brand from its competitors that it can be difficult to know where to begin. From its trademark Caterpillar Yellow to its tradition of making the most rock-solid products on earth, everything about the Caterpillar name is synonymous with the world's toughest machines. In fact, the company's success has led to it being used by economists as a bellwether for the state of the economy as a whole. In Caterpillar: Modern Earthmoving Marvels, author Frank Raczon details the largest and most modern earth-moving machines today, with down-to-earth explanations of how and why they work the way they do as well as interviews and quotes from Caterpillar's engineers and operators themselves. Featuring rare historical photography and insight from noted industrial historian Keith Haddock, this book offers a glimpse of how the Caterpillar's meteoric rise from an under-the-radar producer of agrarian and industrial equipment led to its modern status as an international corporate superstar. Filled with excavators, backhoe loaders, motor-graders, off-highway trucks and more, this book is sure to capture the imagination of anyone who has ever passed a construction site and wondered just how the machines work the way they do and what they're truly capable of.




Mining Machines and Earth-Moving Equipment


Book Description

This book presents central problems in the design, research and maintenance of large-size mining machines for open pits, mobile earth-moving machinery, hydraulic hammers for mining and civil engineering, and screening processes for bulk materials. It brings together the insights of numerous respected academics to offer a thorough and multifaceted overview of the topic. The first few chapters of the book deal with specific problems that frequently occur in machinery for open-pit mining. They focus on the resilience of large-size mining machines, degradation of steels used for supporting structures, and modelling of large-size rotary joints, as well as the noise hazards in connection with degradation processes. The book then moves on to discuss problems arising in earth-moving machinery, such as new approaches to the assessment of operation and maintenance, dynamic loads in front-end loader booms, and synchronic transfer of power from the engine to the driven wheels. The book concludes by discussing hydraulic hammers for mining and civil engineering, and screening processes for bulk materials that combine a vibroscreen with additional feed elements. The book is primarily intended for undergraduate and graduate mechanical engineering courses, but will also be of interest to researchers and mechanical engineers.




Yellow Steel


Book Description

In Yellow Steel, the first overarching history of the earthmoving equipment industry, William Haycraft examines the tremendous increase in the scope of mining and construction projects, from the Suez Canal through the interstate highway system, made possible by innovations in earthmoving machinery. Led by Cyrus McCormick's invention in 1831 of a practical mechanical reaper, many of the builders of today's massive earthmoving machines began as makers of reapers, plows, threshers, and combines. Haycraft traces the efforts of manufacturers such as Caterpillar, Allis-Chalmers, International Harvester, J. I. Case, Deere, and Massey-Ferguson to diversify from farm equipment to specialized earthmoving equipment and the important contributions of LeTourneau, Euclid, and others in meeting the needs of the construction and mining industries. He shows how postwar economic and political events, especially the creation of the interstate highway system, spurred the development of more powerful and more agile machines. He also relates the precipitous fall of several major American earthmoving machine companies and the rise of Japanese competitors in the early 1980s. Extensively illustrated and packed with detailed information on both manufacturers and machines, Yellow Steel knits together the diverse stories of the many companies that created the earthmoving equipment industry--how they began, expanded, retooled, merged, succeeded, and sometimes failed. Their history, a step-by-step linking of need and invention, provides the foundation for virtually all modern transportation, construction, commerce, and industry.




Bucyrus Heavy Equipment


Book Description

Bucyrus-Erie Company is a name synonymous with moving the earth. From the smallest loader-backhoe to some of the largest machines ever to move on land, no other company has produced such a wide variety of types and sizes of excavating equipment. With a rich heritage going back 128 years the company, now known as Bucyrus International Inc., is still designing and building some of the world’s largest shovels and walking draglines. Nothing could be more apt to describe this manufacturing power house than its slogan used in the 1960s “The Longest Line on Earth”. Over 450 spectacular black and white photos combined with detailed captions chronicle and describe all the major equipment product lines from Bucyrus Company, Erie Steam Shovel, Bucyrus-Erie and Ruston-Bucyrus. Every machine model from the extensive lines of cable excavators, hydraulic excavators, walking draglines, stripping shovels and drills is included, plus tables of machine introductions and production. There’s also detailed coverage of floating dredges, tractor equipment, cranes, bucket wheel excavators and other special machines. This book is sure to satisfy the serious equipment historian as well as the enthusiast.




The Earth Mover


Book Description







Giant Earth-moving Equipment


Book Description

Covers the 1950s through the present.




The Earthmover Encyclopedia


Book Description

"This colossal reference book documents the timeless urge to reshape the world, and the machines used to do so from the 1088's to today. From utility tractors and loaders up to the largest diggers and bulldozers, every piece of heavy equipment is listed here by model and manufacturer, making this the most exhaustive book on the world's most hard-working vehicles and machines"--Publisher's description.







Histories of Technology, the Environment and Modern Britain


Book Description

Histories of Technology, the Environment and Modern Britain brings together historians with a wide range of interests to take a uniquely wide-lens view of how technology and the environment have been intimately and irreversibly entangled in Britain over the last 300 years. It combines, for the first time, two perspectives with much to say about Britain since the industrial revolution: the history of technology and environmental history. Technologies are modified environments, just as nature is to varying extents engineered. Furthermore, technologies and our living and non-living environment are both predominant material forms of organisation – and self-organisation – that surround and make us. Both have changed over time, in intersecting ways. Technologies discussed in the collection include bulldozers, submarine cables, automobiles, flood barriers, medical devices, museum displays and biotechnologies. Environments investigated include bogs, cities, farms, places of natural beauty and pollution, land and sea. The book explores this diversity but also offers an integrated framework for understanding these intersections.